Diversion issues in real-time vehicle dispatching

Recent technological advances in communication systems now allow the exploitation of real-time information for dynamic vehicle routing and scheduling. It is possible, in particular, to consider diverting a vehicle away from its current destination in response to a new customer request. In this paper, a strategy for assigning customer requests, which includes diversion, is proposed, and various issues related to it are presented. An empirical evaluation of the proposed approach is performed within a previously reported tabu search heuristic. Simulations compare the tabu search heuristic, with and without the new strategy, on a dynamic problem motivated from a courier service application. The results demonstrate the potential savings that can be obtained through the application of the proposed approach.